And everyone puts on their Camus masks and begin the dance of the red death.

I put in a man who wakes up as a cockroach...

And the hearing-impaired wait staff bring you a plate of kofta.

I put in potted crocuses.

__________________Di

“You always own the option of having no opinion.
There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control.
These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone.” ~ Marcus Aurelius

He sits in front of the window, cutting a small figure in a large chair, at such a distance from the door that we might well have entered the throne room of an aged king. And adding to the pomp of the occasion, we have come with potted flowers held in front of us like candles, crocuses and grape hyacinths, tokens of the spring that has taken root outside. But as we sit down beside the man and he examines our offerings, one at a time, the absurd ceremony of the scene disappears altogether. The veins in his hands are navy blue and fork decisively around his knuckles like rivers. The skin on his wrist is freckled and mottled and wrinkled in shallow ridges, as though rain had carved them out of a hillside. The introduction to his Collected Poems ends, "I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through it and see the world." We thought to bring nature to the artist, but we had only brought nature back to nature. He closes his eyes to smell the flowers, opens them slowly, nods his approval.

A few months shy of his hundred-and-first birthday, Stanley Kunitz sits at the head of the table of American letters, and not by the right of seniority alone...

Along with flowers we have brought questions, questions clumped in notebooks like pebbles in a pouch: Why do you say that being a poet in this age is itself a political action?

He sits in front of the window, cutting a small figure in a large chair, at such a distance from the door that we might well have entered the throne room of an aged king. And adding to the pomp of the occasion, we have come with potted flowers held in front of us like candles, crocuses and grape hyacinths, tokens of the spring that has taken root outside. But as we sit down beside the man and he examines our offerings, one at a time, the absurd ceremony of the scene disappears altogether. The veins in his hands are navy blue and fork decisively around his knuckles like rivers. The skin on his wrist is freckled and mottled and wrinkled in shallow ridges, as though rain had carved them out of a hillside. The introduction to his Collected Poems ends, "I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through it and see the world." We thought to bring nature to the artist, but we had only brought nature back to nature. He closes his eyes to smell the flowers, opens them slowly, nods his approval.

A few months shy of his hundred-and-first birthday, Stanley Kunitz sits at the head of the table of American letters, and not by the right of seniority alone...

Along with flowers we have brought questions, questions clumped in notebooks like pebbles in a pouch: Why do you say that being a poet in this age is itself a political action?